Bowie Takes America : The Making of a Rock Icon

A breakneck, Hunter S. Thompson-esque account of David Bowie’s wildest, most revolutionary years in the United States—a relentless after-midnight ride through the culturally apocalyptic mid-’70s of New York and Los Angeles, leaving Ziggy Stardust behind and charging through Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Station to Station with cocaine-dusted corridors of the occult, music as magick, and sex as invocation

In Bowie Takes America, legendary rock journalist Mick Wall offers a back-seat-of-the-limo account of David Bowie’s all-that-glitters American years—when Ziggy the friendly rock-messiah alien transmogrified again and again while traversing a landscape of decadence and derangement: L.A. orgies and soul clubs, midnight occult rituals, and late-night talk shows, riding through the scorched ruins of Watergate-era America. 

Built on Wall’s extensive research and archives and drawing upon exclusive interviews with former band members, friends, rivals, producers, and Bowie himself, this is Bowie as never seen before: glamorous, burlesque-grotesque, and utterly inimitable. 

Between 1974 and 1976, David Bowie wasn’t just making records—he was making himself a new kind of rock icon. From the skeletal “mutant with red eyes” of Diamond Dogs, through the “plastic soul” regeneration of Young Americans (and his first American number 1 single, “Fame”), to the thin-white paranoia of Station to Station, Bowie’s music, image, and identity were in flux—and the land between New York’s Penn Station and Los Angeles’s Union Station was the crucible that transformed him. 

With Lou Reed and Iggy Pop as shadowy foils, and a supporting cast including John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Angela Bowie, Ava Cherry, Earl Slick, Luther Vandross, Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, Rodney Dangerfield, and Dennis Hopper, Bowie plunged into the American Dream and came out the other side as a different man—and artist.